Charles Gwathmey, the notable New York architect, once wrote, “I have always believed that constraints are the seeds of invention.”
In that case, he was referring to his 1997 addition and renovation of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle—a typically precise intervention of Modernism on a Beaux Arts structure. But constraints, often literally physical, defined much of his most notable public projects, among them a 1970 renovation of Whig Hall at Princeton University, the 1992 addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, and the 2007 renovation and addition to Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale. In each of those cases, Gwathmey and his longtime business partner Robert Siegel were given the task of contending with some of the most complex architectural precedents of the 20th century. At the same time, Gwathmey’s extensive domestic portfolio, which he remained earnestly committed to throughout his career, often seemed constrained by history. In his houses, architectural memory—in particular the precedents of Le Corbusier—was processed and reemerged in a collage of unrelenting geometries.
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